I don't have a typical day. I have two different typical days, corresponding to my two lives: one as clinician teacher and the other as a basic researcher. My teaching, administration, and outpatient practice are in one location at Cornell on the east side of Manhattan. My research lab is on the west side at Columbia. I try as much as possible to spend all day at only one place or the other. So when I am at Cornell, as director of Medical Student Education and clerkship director for the Department of Psychiatry, I teach the third- and fourth-year psychiatry clerkship students in a weekly seminar on psychiatric evaluation and diagnosis, read and grade my students' patient write-ups, work on student grades and evaluations, teach in the preclinical courses when they are in session, and attend a rash of committees and task forces (if that sounds uncomfortable, the metaphor is not unintended). These include, but are not limited to, Weill Cornell Medical College's Clinical Curriculum Committee, of which I am vice chair; the Medical Education Council, which oversees all medical college curriculum; the Education Advisory Council, which is planning for a new education center; a design subcommittee for that new center; my own department's Medical Student Education Committee, which I chair; the Chair's Advisory Council; etc. I reserve the evenings for student office hours and patient sessions. These twilight hours usually feel like a peaceful respite from all the day's other hubbub.

When I am at Columbia, I am all about research. My research is a basic science investigation of the development of maternally-directed orienting behaviors of newborn rats, as a model of the development of the infant mother attachment. This Spring, my K08 (Mentored Scientist Development Award) from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is ending. This means the end of 5 years of the closest thing to academic heaven, short of occupying an endowed chair, that one could wish for. Now I am becoming like every other academic researcher embarking on the endless (if you are one of the lucky ones) scramble for funding to keep the project going. Currently as the clock ticks down, I am rewriting my R01 NIMH project grant for a second resubmission (due March 1) and at the same time writing large pieces of collaborative program project grants with two groups of researchers. Meanwhile, semirecovered procrastinator that I am, I must get several more publications into the pipeline in order to beef up my competitiveness for all of these grants. You should understand that when I say I am all about research on the Columbia days, I am not spending hours on end with the animals. In fact, my full-time research assistant does most of the hands-on work of my research, while I spend most of the day at my desk thinking, reading, crunching numbers at my computer, and writing. Research also has its share of meetings, although these are mainly lab presentations by members of the research department I work in (which is called Developmental Psychobiology), or presentations from other groups, of which there are many at Columbia in the psychiatry/neuroscience realm.

The time breakdown is about one-third Cornell teaching, administration, and patients, and two-thirds Columbia research. Is this confusing? Yes! While I try to engineer my time so that the work of each location stays put where it belongs and the two don't mix, one does bleed into the other. Inevitably, there are committee meetings at Cornell that fall on my Columbia days, some of which I feel obligated to go to. And of course, there are calls from patients on days when I am not at Cornell. Most of my patients know that I am at Columbia at least 3 days a week, but I have them call only my Cornell phone and leave messages there, which I check several times a day, and I respond to the ones that aren't urgent (the vast majority) at the end of the day. Surprisingly to me, the day-to-day work of the medical student program has proven hard to contain. Although my administrative assistant for the education program is terrific, she calls me most days that I am at Columbia, often multiple times to discuss student problems or administrative issues that require my attention. The inverse occurs much less often. My research assistant at Columbia does not frequently call or page me at Cornell. One might think that because research deals with the unknown and teaching deals with the known, the spill over would be predominantly the other way around (i.e., that my research assistant would have more questions to call me about than my education program assistant would) but not so. This must say something deep about the slow pace of discovery in research and the high degree of unpredictability in even the best planned teaching programs (which I like to think mine is).

The interruptions definitely break my concentration and make me less efficient in my research. But I think that is a small price for getting to do at least three things I love, namely, teaching medical students, doing basic research, and helping patients. I worry constantly that this juggling act will end when one of the balls falls to the floor. For instance, my department chair one day tells me he can no longer afford to pay me to teach because his revenues are in free fall, or, more likely, there is a gap in my research funding large enough to force me to shut the door to the lab behind me for good. I work hard, but I view all of these roles as privileges, each of which I hope to do well enough to earn the right to keep going as long as I can for the foreseeable future.